New York Stories: An Oral Historian Takes on 9/11

In an age of 24-hour news coverage, personal memories can get lost in the noise. It's Mary Marshall Clark's job to turn off the TV and listen.

Michael Keller

On
September 12, 2001, Mary Marshall Clark started the day setting out for work --
and ended up beginning a job that has occupied her for the last 10 years. The
city, she remembers, was eerily quiet for a place where people usually don't
stop talking. "There was a strong feeling you had to keep going and not
look -- not to think about it -- just keep going with your work," she says. Clark did
both.

In the days following the World Trade Center attacks,
Clark, one of the world's foremost oral historians, started an interview
project analyzing the role September 11 played in New Yorkers'
lives and how these New York stories differ from what 9/11 has come to mean
in the national media. Ten years later, after thousands of hours of interviews
and tens of thousands of pages of transcripts, Clark is beginning to understand
what it all means.

Clark
is the director of the Columbia Center for Oral History, a single room on the
eighth floor of Columbia University's main campus library. No elevator goes to
the eighth floor; to get to it, you walk up two flights and follow a narrow
white hallway lined with appointment-only study cubicles. On one side, you'll
find a single door with a frosted glass window and a small placard identifying
the office.

This little-known office, whose interior Clark designed, is one open
space with dark wood molding and glass half-wall dividers between desks -- meant
to break down the office hierarchies and encourage conversation. The office's
high ceilings and skylights fill it with light, illuminating books upon books
that follow a wraparound walkway along the walls, like an antique library.

The
September 11th Oral History Narrative and Memory Project set out to
understand how the attacks affected the lives of everyday New Yorkers over
three years following the attacks. After the attacks, Clark turned off her TV out of
concern about her son viewing violent imagery. But as an oral historian -- a member of a profession
that seeks to collect and preserve a diversity of voices -- removing the images on television was symbolic of what
10 years of analysis has led Clark to
believe: September 11 has many meanings for New Yorkers, but media's version is far
from the truth.

* * *

The
outside of the Columbia library bears the classic names of antiquity
("Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes" etc). Clark points to one in
particular as her profession's predecessor: the first historian Herodotus, who
believed that a history of an event is incomplete until the historian has
interviewed everyone involved. In an article recently accepted by the journal Radical History Review entitled "Herodotus Reconsidered," Clark argues
this very point: that historians in general, not just oral historians, must
take the plurality of voices into account since one event can mean many things
for many people.

Whether
such a personal form of storytelling should be considered on par with objective
history, however, is debated. Social psychologists have shown in a number of
studies that individuals' recollections of events are subject to distortions in
memory, forgetting of events, and, most interestingly, group convergence. A
series of studies in the 1950s known as the Asch Conformity Experiments showed
how susceptible people were to external opinions even on simple tasks such as
judging whether a given line was longer than another.

One
of the seminal figures in the field, however, an Italian historian named
Alessandro Portelli, defends the value of oral history. First, he points out
that oral histories have a richness of emotion and memory, which provides historical
context. Second, he debunks the notion that traditional history is itself free
from subjectivities. Formal historical records such as police reports or court
documents, he points out, inevitably stem from eyewitness or oral accounts.
When they are written down they become "official" versions of events but are not
necessarily any more reliable, Portelli argues.

In oral history, you can
understand "what people did, what they wanted to do, what they believed they
were doing, and what they now think they did," he writes. Or, as Clark
paraphrases Sartre, the value is "not only in what happened, but in what people did with what happened."

While
Clark was in the field training interviewers, reviewing transcripts, and trying
to make sense of the diverse experiences she was hearing in the fall of 2001,
another, simpler story was developing in the media. As often happens after
historically important events, a mainstream view of September 11 was
emerging: The attacks in New York and Washington were acts of war and, as such,
required swift retaliation.

By
contrast, for the majority of those who gave oral histories of September 11, the day largely wasn't about retaliation, "it was a deeply sad day," Clark
says, one that gave people pause and time for mourning. According to Clark,
sadness, survivor's guilt, and a sense of surrealism -- not anger -- were the
predominant affects her team found in the collection. In the collection,
Democrats and lifelong Republicans speak about their worry that the U.S. rushed
to war too quickly and lamented that only more violence would most likely
result.

James Dobon, a paramedic who rescued scored of people Lower Manhattan
that day is one example: "The one thing that's changed the most is, like,
what's going on now in Iraq -- no, not Iraq, in Afghanistan, I'm sorry, in
Afghanistan," he says. "Even after this happened and they started talking about
retaliation, I'm more of a pacifist than ever. I said -- and I'm a
Republican -- because what I saw that day, the devastation, I could not basically
see us doing to other people. Life is too cheap then; it doesn't mean anything,
and there's not reason for it."

But
to get to this personal meaning of September 11 wasn't easy. Given the
research on consensus memories, Clark knew that her interviews would have to be
more complex to get at the personal experience people had on of September 11.
To do this, she employed an interview technique known as the life-history
approach that lets people start the oral history at any point in their life.

The interviews, then, follow the narrators they thread a story through the most
important moments in their lives until they make arrive at September 11,
2001, setting the events of that day against the rest of their lives. As such,
the interviewees tell the events of his life at their own pace and within the
narrative of their own lives rather than a hopping onto the pervasive
mass-media narrative.

Clark
traces her ability to patiently conduct hours-long interviews like these back
to her childhood, where she learned to train wild horses in the rural North
Carolina town where she grew up. "I'm comfortable with silence. I'm comfortable
with observation. I'm comfortable with non-verbal communication," she says. "A
lot of the interviews I do are based on my ability to communicate with people
non-verbally, maybe to sense what is going on beneath the surface, which is
what you have to do with horses. If you can't feel it, you're not going to know
it," she explains. "Oral history is not about mastering the facts, it's about
understanding where they are coming from, understanding what they may be
feeling when they are talking, knowing when not to press too far, knowing when
to press a little more."

Clark
explains her interview style saying, "If you read a lot of my awkward first
questions it sounds like I don't know what I'm doing because I say, 'I'd like
to know something about you, anything, really. You could start anytime you
like, your parents your great grandparents. I would like to know how they
voted, what kind of cards they played, what kind of newspapers they read, when
TV came into your house--whatever you want to start with, or how about your own
life, whatever you choose.' That's how I start an interview."

One
of the themes Clark is studying is how the treatment of 9/11 in the media
exacerbated survivor's guilt. Clark explains, the dominant narrative in the
media following September 11 was that of sacrifice. In an attempt to make sense
out of the unexplainable, the idea that people died for something restored some sense. The firefighters who were
killed, for example, were exalted for sacrificing themselves for others. People
who paid the ultimate price for their fellow men were the ones given the highest
tribute. But sacrifice is a double-edged sword, Clark explains, because those
who survived were not given the media's highest honors, despite their heroics.

Almost
every person in the collection mentions leaving someone else behind, and guilt
is a common theme. One oral history given by a paramedic named James Dobson,
who rescued scores of people using his ambulance as a shuttle, shows how people
that weren't firefighters were largely neglected. "No one really cared about
us. I mean me, and Marvin, my partner and all, we weren't invited to anything.
They had concerts in the city and all the firemen, policemen went," Dobson
says. "And we weren't invited to anything. We were unknown."

Robert
Snyder, a historian at Rutgers University, was a few blocks from the first
tower when it fell. Workers at a McDonalds in Lower Manhattan pulled him in out
of the ash and gave him water, saving his life, he says. The lesson he tells
his young son about September 11 is that it was a day where
"ordinary people saved each other" -- when people across the city had something
in common and did something.

Talat
Hamdani, an immigrant and a mother of a young New York police cadet, volunteer
EMT and college student also found redemption in that day even though it was
the day she lost her son. Her son, Salman, died while rescuing others and
because he was a Muslim and worked in chemical research, his death was withheld
from his family for four months while he was posthumously investigated for
potential terrorist activities. Hamdani tells the story of her son alongside
her own story of adopting America as her new country and the betrayal felt from
the government's suspicion and lies. Although she had every reason to never
forgive her adopted country, in her interview, when she comes to the telling of
her son's funeral, she has found a measure of peace in his death.

Salman's contribution was finally acknowledged with a full
NYPD funeral service attended by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Commissioner Raymond
Kelly and Congressman Gary Ackerman. And after telling all of the hardship of
raising a child as an immigrant and finding work in her life story, Hamdani
reflects and arrives at the end of her oral history with this paragraph about
her son:

Two
years ago one of my nephews had died, who was also with the NYPD. Salman was a
very humble person. I don't remember celebrating anything for him in America
except his firth birthday in Pakistan. Even when he did his bachelor's, no
party. No party. "I'll tell you when to celebrate." So two years ago, one of my
nephews had died of cancer. He was thirty-four years old, he was a sergeant and
a veteran, and he saw the funeral that he had gotten from the NYPD, and he
said, 'Mama, this is honor. This is how I want to go.' And that's how he went.

Ten
years later it is easy to forget the few days after 9/11 when it was still so
new. There was the anthrax scare and Muslim paranoia, which hasn't disappeared
today. Clark and her team had the foresight to scour the city and capture those
impressions before the memories faded or collapsed into each other. Excerpts of
19 interviews will appear in a book this fall entitled After the Fall, published by the New Press. Fifty or a hundred
years from now, the stories people will read of September 11 will be
these and Clark, contentedly, doesn't know what people will find, or if any
correct interpretation is even possible.

"Still
today you could read all the interviews in the collection and they may not make
sense to you," she says. "I'm stock-piling for the future."

The
long tail of September 11 is still in the making: "In a hundred years from now
it will be one of the more important memories in New York City in the way that
the triangle fire is now." As for the collection, Clark says, it has turned
into something larger and more enduring than the sum of its parts. "I think
it's a portrait of New York City. And for that I feel good."

Michael Keller is a journalist and producer for the New York World, an online and investigative startup reporting on state and city government. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post's Health and Business sections.